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Sense VR

Exposure Therapy with Virtual Reality

Team

Commissioner:

Description

The Journey from Sprint 2 Sprint!

Time flies and our project is taking shape and transforming into new possibilities. The last few weeks have been very hectic trying to get everything ready for our meeting with Triple.

In the first week of our sprint we did a Visual Thinking and Communication Workshop (www.loesbogers.com) with two ex-MediaLAB workers. They thought us how to doddle and sketch our ideas to visualize our ideas in an easy way. It was a lot of fun and we even made some drawings of each other.

From the first sprint we decided to go from the overall look on the emotion of fear and narrow it down to more specifically looking at anxiety among young women in the ages from 15-24.

As we already have done a lot of research in our previous sprint about fear, we decided to take it to a next level and focus on anxiety as anxiety is rooted in a lot of irrational fears that are affecting people’s everyday lives. Seeing how big of an issue anxiety is, and especially among young women and girls in their teens we have decided to put our attention towards young girls and women in the ages 15-24 in Generation Z with a slight overlap to the late bloomers in the Millennials generation. We did this aw we wanted to put our attention towards a group of people whom we can have a big impact on with the product we come up with.

 

Anxiety disorders are also the most common mental disorders in western countries, and as many as 4 out of 100 experience anxiety globally. In addition women are twice as likely as men to experience anxiety, and anxiety levels among young women and girls are higher than ever, and keeps on rising. Increasing numbers of academic studies are finding that mental health problems have been soaring among girls over the past 10 – and in particular the last five – years. The physical responses are also better detectable in women compared to man.

Many young girls and women face a huge range of pressures. In particular, the rise of social media means they need to always be available, they may seek reassurance in the form of likes and shares, and they are faced with constant images of ‘perfect’ bodies or ‘perfect’ lives, making it hard not to compare themselves to others. Fear of failure and fear of being left out socially is especially troubling young girls. NHS data shows 68% rise in hospital admissions because of self-harm among girls under 17 in past decade. Body dissatisfaction is seen in about 10% of girls at primary school but really jumps in early adolescence, as puberty is starting, and about 50% of girls age 15 feel that they are too fat. During this period girls tend to self-objectify more than boys, experience more teasing around weight and shape and perceive more pressure from friends and family to be thin.

Through research and conducting surveys we are aware of a lot of the triggers that makes the young girls and women feel inadequate, like social media, peer-pressure, body dissatisfaction, bullying, stress at school, FOMO (fear of missing out), and the tendency to ruminate. Understanding the fears of young girls and women will definitely help us in our process towards making an adaptable and immersive environment that can empower these young girls and women to become more confident in their own skin, and eventually become anxious free.

Through the VR environment we aim to:
– Improve their ability to adapt to life’s challenges (e.g. flexibility, optimism, social competence, emotional management and positive self-esteem)
– Face fear through building courage (e.g. mental, intellectual, emotional and moral)
– Developing intellectual courage to not fear what others think
– Learning self-acceptance that will create inner strength
– Boosting buoyancy and adaptation to the challenges children and young people face

With a well defined target group we decided to do our translate session at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, where our team member Christiaan had to have a pitstop presentation about our project this far. He designed a good looking poster that he presented for the rest of his class. Beside looking at other projects and gaining some new insights we also got a lot of good feedback from different teachers in how to improve our ideas.

As research, surveys and interviews have been taking a lot of our time this last 2 sprints we decided that it was time to get creative and generate some cool concepts to present for our client Triple during our next meeting. With good knowledge about our target group we could pour out with several different ideas with brainstorming in how to help our target group overcome their fears, anxieties and phobias.

 

Working on our presentation until the final end before our meeting we delivered 3 different concepts to Triple in how to help our target audience.

Below you can see the different Moodboards of the 3 different concepts we presented for Triple.

Virtual Group Therapy (MORPG) 

Emotional Internal Journey

Cinematic Emphatic Experience

After feedback from Triple we have chosen to go the route of the Virtual Emotional Journey concept and are excited to continue to work on it for the rest of the project. We have still a lot of work to do, and next sprint will be focused on researching implementation of Oculus Rift with the Sensor technology, and how to extract and transform the data to create the adaptable environment that can be used as a form of exposure therapy for people with different phobias.

Below you can see our first storyboard from the selected concept. Drawing made by Rory!

Until next time!

Love,

MERAQI